Labor pain: Work can be bad for your health

15 government agencies among state's top 25 filers

Nov. 24, 2013

Written by

Russ Zimmer | CentralOhio.com

It turns out that your job isn’t just stressful, unfulfilling and doesn’t pay enough. It can be dangerous, too — especially if you work for the government.

CentralOhio.com reviewed data from nearly 1.3 million claims filed with the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation between 2003 and 2012, and one thing is clear: People in any occupation can get hurt in any number of ways.

“You (have) the person going into work, they’ve parked in the company parking lot and they slip on the ice and fall. And you’ve got the guy who is moving a lot of heavy stuff and somewhere along the way he picks something up and hears a snap in his back,” said Stewart Jaffy, a Columbus attorney who has been representing employees in workers’ compensation cases for 45 years.

Sprains and strains were the most common injuries, but insect bites, gangrene, frostbite and other maladies also sidelined thousands of workers during that 10-year period. Ohio averaged one injury claim per 42 workers, according to the claims data and figures from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

All those claims add up: The bureau paid $1.9 billion in benefits during its past fiscal year. The insurance fund is fed by premiums assessed on employers — more than $2 billion in 2012.

Of the 25 employers with the most injury claims filed from 2003 through 2012, 15 are governmental entities. On average, about 20 workers per week filed injury claims with the city of Cleveland, and the city of Columbus was not far behind. Those cities are the state’s two highest-reporting employers, respectively, when it comes to injuries sustained on the job.

One reason is those cities have a large number of employees. Midge Slemmer, benefits and risk manager for the city of Columbus, said 8,000 people, on average, are working for the city on any given day, which would make it one of the 50 largest employers in the state.

However, that doesn’t explain why Columbus reports more injuries than Wal-Mart, which employs more Ohioans than any other employer — 50,625 as of March — according to the Ohio Development Services Agency. In addition to Cleveland and Columbus, the retail giant also trails a more obviously dangerous place of work, Ohio’s penal system, in terms of the number of injured-worker claims.

Whether it’s a correctional officer wrangling an inmate or a street department employee painting the edge lines along the side of a highway, public service jobs often are inherently dangerous, said Joe Weidner, spokesman for Council 8 of the American Federation State County and Municipal Employees, which represents 41,000 government and nonprofit workers in Central Ohio.

“Part of it is the nature of the work,” he said. “We had five individuals killed on the job last year.”

Schools have all the trips and slips of any business, but they have another factor — students — to contend with, said Donna Sears, benefits coordinator at Newark City Schools.

“A large percentage of our claims are injuries sustained by employees in their work capacity with students. This is especially true of staff dealing with our disabled student population,” she said. “The school system provides adequate training to our staff to assist them in dealing with these types of situations, however, the spontaneity of the incident more often than not leads to injury of our staff.”

Lu Diday, who runs the workers’ compensation program for Richland County, said most of its 611 claims originated from the sheriff’s office or Richland Newhope, which runs seven group homes that serve the county’s developmentally disabled population.

Who's watching out for public servants?

Unlike private employers, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration has no authority when it comes to public-sector employers.

Public employees in Ohio weren’t even covered by workplace safety laws until a statute went into effect in 1994. That law created the Public Employment Risk Reduction Program, an OSHA-like watchdog for local and state government facilities.

“The primary difference is that OSHA has one inspection tool that we do not have, which is what most people refer to as random unannounced inspections,” said Glenn McGinley, program administrator.

The program responds to scenes where a public employee has died on the job, where multiple people have been injured in a single event, where a complaint that imminent danger exists or where government entities invite inspectors in to do a compliance walkthrough.

Those inspections are reactionary in nature, but McGinley said officials are effective in eliciting change where they are summoned. He could not recall one case in the program’s history when a public employer was taken to court — the final stage in their enforcement mechanism.

Still, he estimates only 60 to 75 complaints are lodged annually by public employees in Ohio, a state where more than 513,000 people were full-time government employees and an additional 200,000 were part-timers in 2011. PERRP has six investigators to monitor more than 3,800 state and local government employers, he said.

Changing the culture

Part of the problem is some employers — public and private — don’t value safety policies as an integral part of their operation, said Tom Heebner, an assistant vice president in the Risk Services Division of the insurance brokerage HUB International.

Creating that kind of culture begins by asking job candidates about their attitudes and experiences regarding safe work environments and giving those answers weight in the hiring decision, Heebner said.

Employers have to follow that up by making adherence to the safety policy something the employee is graded on when they are reviewed for a raise or promotion, he said.

It might sound like quite a shift — considering safety alongside productivity and other operating metrics — but it will pay off, he said.